Opinion: Civilization must declare war on radical Islamism

AmotzAsa-El

Columnist

It isn’t frequently that civilization faces a common enemy. It last happened when Nazism made communist and capitalist fight shoulder to shoulder, and before that when the Black Death marched across continents.

In terms of aims, methods, and reach, radical Islamism — namely, the minority of Muslims who try to violently impose themselves on the rest of the world — is the new global scourge. British Prime Minister David Cameron has warned that, if not confronted on its turf, ISIS and its terror will arrive “on the streets of Britain.”

That sense of threat is universal.

A world war

In Kunming, China, Islamists stabbed to death 29 passersby last March, five months after Islamists murdered two passersby in Tiananmen Square. In Russia, 34 people were murdered last December in Volgograd in two suicide bombings, nine years after Islamists massacred 334 people in Beslan, nearly half of them children. Deadly Islamist attacks elsewhere in recent years, from India, Pakistan, Kenya, and Egypt to France, Belgium, Spain, and Argentina need no retelling, not to mention 9/11.

In Europe, fears like Cameron’s are fed by the failure to integrate 38 million Muslims, some of whom are now trickling back from Islamist war zones ready to terrorize Europe.

Islamism is not made of one skin. Afghanistan’s Taliban and Iran’s Ayatollahs are sworn enemies as are Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Gaza’s Hamas; Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi wore Western suits while Nigeria’s Boko Haram bans Western attire; Somalia’s Al-Shabaab ignores the rest of the world while ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has vowed to march on Rome.

Yes, a pan-Islamist alliance like the one between fascist Germany, Italy and Japan is unlikely, and a centrally controlled global network of jihadist agents like Lenin’s Comintern is unthinkable. Even so, radical Islamists share a feeling that the rise of civilizations that rival theirs is a historic aberration, and they agree that those who do not share their faith inhabit a lower moral plain.

From these assumptions the road is short to the attack that the rest of the world has come to face, an assault so global it has already traveled from Bali, Indonesia, where 202 vacationers were murdered in 2002, to Canada, where Islamists were caught in 2006 plotting to seize Parliament and behead the prime minister.

The Bali bombings caught me while visiting my mother in her old-age home. A retired secretary and full-time grandmother she had no academic pretensions, may she rest in peace. She was, however, a graduate of Auschwitz where she majored in world wars. Now, watching on TV the gruesome scenes in distant Indonesia, she ruled: “It’s a world war.”

Twelve years on, her impression is shared by Cameron, Obama, the leaders of China, Russia, Canada, France, and Germany, and also by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who warns of an alliance between ISIS and Jemaah Islamiyah, Islamism’s torchbearer in Abbott’s Indonesian backyard.

In short, the civilized world — namely, those who do not attack people for having the wrong faith — has an enemy, and it must confront it together. What until now was an unfocused defensive must give way to an international offensive, on three fronts: military, finance, and education.

What to do

First, the five world powers, plus Egypt and India, should meet and declare radical Islamism an enemy of civilization. Calling this cause “a war on terror” is a misnomer, and sends a message of weakness. It is the equivalent of Churchill calling the war on Nazism “the war on blitzkrieg” and Roosevelt calling his “the war on the kamikaze.” The enemy cannot be identified by its methods. It must be identified by its cause.

Second, the meeting should declare immediate war on ISIS and swiftly defeat it. ISIS embodies a turning point in Islamism’s audacity, and if decisively routed by an international force, its demise can mark the turning point after which radical Islamism will be on the run.

ISIS is vulnerable. Until now Islamism either wrested states, like Iran, or undid them, as it did to Somalia. ISIS is doing something new, trying to create a state from scratch. It is a quest that can be thwarted easily. The governors and mayors it installs while marching hundreds to their executions should be immediate targets along with their operations. ISIS’s failure to govern will make its march on Rome scatter at Nineveh.

The same goes for ISIS’s arms. The materiel it captured from the Iraqi army can be destroyed within days, until ISIS is left with nothing but rifles. The tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery it snatched should be hit now, when it still does not know how to properly operate and maintain this hardware.

As has been explained here previously , the terrain ISIS inhabits is flat, insular, and surrounded by mountainous enemies. ISIS’s recent encroachment on the Kurdish foothills, and its rapid eviction from there, underscore this vulnerability.

ISIS is geographically trapped, and its fanaticism prevented it from turning even one of its neighbors into an ally. Lacking an air force, and with its heavy armor and all its vehicles difficult to hide in the surrounding flatlands, any wheels ISIS drives should therefore be easy prey for an orderly aerial attack.

Financial assault

The military assault should come coupled with a financial assault.

German Development Minister Gerd Mueller’s charge, that ISIS is funded by Qatar, should be thoroughly probed. If true, such a country should be ostracized by the rest of the world, because its money fueled the massacres of thousands whose crime was that they belonged to the wrong faith. It should go without saying that if implicated Qatar should immediately lose its hosting of World Cup 2022.

Some have suggested that Saudi Arabia funded ISIS. If so, then Riyadh, too, would have to learn that the bastards are changing the rules, because the non-Islamist world is finally rising on its feet, and will not stand by while Islamists behead journalists and shoot in the head lines of sinless Christians, Shiites, Yazidis, and Kurds. If someone in Saudi Arabia funded ISIS, then he should be handed over to an American court of law, because he caused James Foley’s murder.

True, such as attitude toward the Saudis is tricky, considering their oil’s role in Western industry. Yet if David Cameron’s and Tony Abbott’s statements are not to remain as hollow words, then Riyadh will have to demonstrate it is part of the solution rather than the problem.

These immediate military and financial moves would be coupled with a consolidation of the global hunt after radicals that is largely underway, but is inefficient. An announcement that the seven anti-Islamist powers are pooling intelligence and coordination operations will drive the message that traffic laws are changing, and that for radical Islamists no place in the world is safe.

Beyond all these confrontational measures, civilization’s war will have to deploy its enemy’s chief weapon: education.

Islamism wins its souls not in the military camp, but in the school and kindergarten. That is where the other becomes an enemy, where innocents’ blood is let and where suicide becomes an honor, value, and key to salvation. The civilized world must confront this.

The clerics must be debated, in their audiences’ languages, in social networks, in websites, in movies, in TV programs, on billboards, in newspaper ads, soccer stadiums, and through newly established and well-funded schools and kindergartens where children will learn that no one is their enemy, except the radicals who would have them drown in the blood of innocent people like James Foley.

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